Police Arrest 'Honey' Producers for Shilling Sugar Syrup
Jakarta. Police in Jakarta have arrested two people for allegedly passing off sugar syrup as honey, in the latest food scare highlighting the lack of oversight by regulators in Indonesia.
Sr. Comr. Umar Farouq, the head of the East Jakarta Police, said the suspects were arrested last week in the Makasar area of East Jakarta following complaints that the bottled honey they had been selling for nearly 50 years was fake.
The suspects, whom police have not publicly named, are aged 76 and 58 years.
“They’ve been running the business since 1970,” Umar said.
He added that their main customers were herbal drinks shops, which typically use honey as a natural sweetener in the popular health tonics known as jamu.
The honey, though, was found to be anything but, Umar said. “They just mixed sugar with baking soda and citric acid.”
He noted that the bottles of honey, advertised as being produced by wild bees from the slopes of Mount Tambora, a volcano in West Nusa Tenggara province, also carried a valid certification number from food and drug regulators.
Umar did not say whether his office would look into how the producers managed to be certified for a fake product.
The suspects face up to five years in prison if found guilty of violating food safety and consumer protection laws.
The discovery of the fake honey comes on the heels of a recent scare about synthetic rice made using a potentially toxic plasticizer, as well as a series of raids by regulators cracking down on the widespread use of banned preservatives in street food.
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